A printer in a computer system typically is seen as handling the mechanics of physically outputting information on a medium, typically paper. The printer is somewhat of a passive participant in the computer system. Printers handle a bit of higher level control for controlling printing such as keeping a queue of documents to be printed, indicating the toner is low, or providing an out-of-paper message. Printers do not typically provide any assistance with processing actual content for printing on an output medium.
Knowledge workers are now making increasing use of multimedia data, particularly in reports and presentations. The multimedia data typically includes time based data sometimes also referred to as time based media, examples of which include audio clips, animations, and video clips. A computer, typically a desktop computer or a laptop, connected to the printer via a network interface or a direct connection, has to have the necessary hardware and/or software for modifying the multimedia content for printing, formatting that content for a desired medium, and selecting the desired medium upon which to imprint the content. If users at different computers in a network desire to perform multimedia content processing functions and output to different media, the different computers each have to have the appropriate hardware and/or software. Furthermore, their computers have to handle the computational load required for multimedia content processing and for supporting specific formats for storing and printing multimedia content.
It is desirable to offload at least part of the computational load to an intelligent printer that can perform multimedia content processing, particularly for time-based data, such as editing and content formatting independently from a computer to which it is connected. It is desirable also that the printer provides a variety of output media options. It is also desirable that the printer can provide storage for the various forms of output media for example in a multimedia content database. A printer that can independently maintain a multimedia database provides streamlined storage of the multimedia content.